July 29 - 4:05pm EDT   Having completed its beta program, Side Effects has released the full 9.5 version of Houdini, its professional 3D animation suite. This is the first version of the software for the Mac, but changes from past versions include improved documentation, with phrase and Boolean searches as well as division into beginner, intermediate and advanced instructions. [full story]

March 28 - 5:45pm EDT   GarageGames recently unveiled Torque X 2.0, a major update to its 2D/3D capable game engine system, adding support for the Microsoft XNA 2.0 Framework, as well as several performance increases in 3D environments. The new engine supports LOD terrain with clip map texturing, and also adds DTS Mesh, and XNA Model support. A free version of Torque X is available, while the Pro version starts at $150 for independent developers. [full story]